chapulines

So are woodchucks (I think woodchuck is a peppier name than ground hog which has slothful implications) vegetarians?  Oh I guess animals aren't vegetarians, they are herbivores, probably a stout fellow, like the woodchuck is an omnivore, he looks like a critter who eats bugs too.

A week from today we are showing a movie in our meeting room, Beginning of the End, in which giant grasshoppers wend their way from Champaign to Chicago where they try to get at the scientist and his pretty young girl friend in the Wrigley Building,  Amazing with all the things a herd of giant grasshoppers can do that they should decide that they want to eat humans.  I'm pretty sure regular grasshoppers are herbivores, but these guys have been feeding on radioactive tomatoes grown at the university of Illinois and I guess like Adam and Eve eating forbidden fruit can do strange things to your circumstances.

Anyway if giant grasshoppers can eat people why can't we eat regular grasshoppers?  Well we can and we do, just not us Americans.  Every now and then there will be some item on the local news where people are eating bugs and some responsible scientist type guy will say how nutritious they are and how this could revolutionize our food chain, but nothing ever seems to come of it.  But I did find this at the google machine.  I think we can put out a sack or two of these at our movie.  https://www.amazon.com/Chapulines-grasshoppers-Gourmet-insects-Chipotle/dp/B018WOSXEK  I'll inform the Institute as to how it goes over.

Goes to ground, I like that phrase.  Remember how Bugs had that cozy little den underground?  Must be nice to have a place to call your own,

I've read somewhere that in the most primitive societies the leader is not supported by the tribe.  He has to hunt and gather like everybody else.  One wonders how that transition first occurred where some guy got supported by the rest of the tribe, surely a landmark step in our journey from animal skins to new blue jeans.  I reckon part of it was a kind of extortion where the leader dropped in for supper and the diners didn't want to say anything lest they get last dibs on the mammoth carcass, and the other part was bribes inviting the leader over for supper in hopes of favors.

I guess there were some benefits to grubbing in the ground while the king and the priests lounged large.  Those guys still needed the grubbers to do the grubbing so they had to keep them alive and working, and there were probably a lot more grubbers than royalty and holy men so they had to worry about uprisings.

I've been reading a book lately about peasant uprisings during the middle ages, seems like they happened pretty often.  They were put down pretty brutally, but it made the upper classes edgy so they trod a little more lightly on the backs of the grubbers.

These days in the western world we have a pretty sizable middle class, we also by and large have democracies.  Do you think the two are related?